This might be a new innovation that aims at ensuring the security of your digital devices. I am however skeptical about a few things. What happens when you injure your fingers? Safety is another issue. The sensor transforms the image from the fingers into encrypted data that can still be hacked by experienced hackers.

Nice to see I'm not the only skeptic, Al, but I didn't even think about the possibility of identity theft through fingerprints but you never know what hackers will come up with next! definitely could happen.

W@hile fingerprint recognition hardware may be quite able to record a really high definition image of a fingerprint, , it then gest converted into a string of digital data, at which point it is probably much easier to compromise. Just like those unpickable locks that can be broken fairly easily, not every methode is secure from end-to-end, and it looks to me like the fingerprint system could be hacked a bit farther downstream. So uniqueness is not the only concern here.

The biggest problem is that damage to your fingertips would lock you out of the system. I'm talking a cut or a burn. I solder small parts and am forever burning slots and holes in my fingertips, and my coffee machine (yep it has a fingerprint sensor) didn't recognise me. Luckily it has a bypass button, but that wouldn't be an option for secure access to something.

I'm with you on that for the same reasons, and given that mythbusters actually circumvented a fingerprint system buy photocopying a fingerprint they pulled of a surface I think only high resolution capacitive sensors offer any real level of security.

They say that fingerprints are more secure than passwords, but I beg to differ on that. While they are almost unique (seriously only almost) unless the verification system also verifies that the fingerprint is on a real hand of a living person a well chosen non-shared password will be more secure.

In case you're wondering why I said "almost" earlier, New Scientist published an article on forensics a while back where they stated roughly how many people in the world (statistically) share the same fingerprints and it wasn't one :-). Of course the likelyhood of 2 people with the same fingerprints crossing paths is much less again.

Not being bug-free would especially be a problem for this technology. Nothing like security technology that doesn't work properly. Does this also open the door to stealing identities via fingerprint scans? Not sure about if that is an issue.

True, shehan, these things usually prove themselves fairly quickly. I myself am a cautious early adopter--I think usually by version 2 or 3, products really hit their stride. The only exception I made was the iPhone, but I still think the later versions were better!

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